The Cat Update

For the cats in our neighborhood we have gotten 31 cats vetted and returned to the colony and have removed 9 tame cats/kittens for adoption. Out of the cats removed for adoption, one was extremely pregnant and gave birth to five orange kittens once in the rescue. So that’s five additional cats that were never added to the colony. Though we originally estimated 60 cats in the colony, that number has been lowered, unfortunately since some cats were killed during the poisonings, some died in other ways, and one we had to have euthanized for advanced feline leukemia. Further a neighbor took in an injured kitten and had her spayed, thus fixing her and removing her from the colony, and another sympathetic person trapped and neutered 2 other cats from the colony. At this point we believe that we have spayed all the females in the main part of the colony. There are a couple males left to get, and then however many cat have gone off in ones and twos to other parts of the neighborhood.

We are now trying to continue care for the cats who are still outside. I still visit and feed Pookie and Omar every single day. Sometimes Lilly or Terry show up, but mostly it’s just Pookie and Omar. Sean built a gorgeous shelter for Leilei and Deedee and they sleep there every night and we feed them too.

Sometimes I’m still heartbroken over the situation. Omar is more or less tame with me now, and after all this time Pookie is pretty trusting of me too. I think they could be placed in a home, but then again our efforts to re-home cats from this colony have not always been successful. These cats often have issues. Pookie and Omar are both ear-tipped as well. But I worry about them out there. Moe, a young male, has been missing for some time now and we have to assume that something bad has happened to him. There are so many dangers in a setting like this. Still I’d rather give them a chance at life than not. And had we never undertaken to neuter this colony, we’d be dealing with a far greater disaster by now.

One thing I found after embarking on this effort, for the first time just as a couple, Sean and I, on our own, was that there’s a whole strange and confusing web of feral cat help out there. Some of this help has been so generous and so crucial, and at other times we were a little stumped by what we encountered.

The story starts off with us moving to a neighborhood where we discovered an enormous sprawling colony of feral cats were in constant conflict with neighbors. Were we to have taken these cats to a regular vet the project would have been impossible. Let’s say that we were to take 40 cats to our regular vet for sterilization and vaccination. So $100 per neuter and $150 per spay, plus $25 for the rabies vaccination. That’s scary enough. But during our efforts with this colony we also incurred a great many emergency vet bills, for a cat who pulled her stitches out, for sick and injured cats. So you can imagine our vet bill would be daunting. Not to mention that we’re living in a low-income neighborhood primarily because we are actually, drum roll please, low income. Then you add the costs of feeding and caring for the cats, and building the cat shelter. Ouch. So we figured out pretty early that we couldn’t do this on our own.

We started going to the low-cost Washington Humane Clinic, but even doing that on our own got a little rough. So we found a group that generously offered to cover the surgeries for 20 ferals. We would still pay the costs for any tame cats we tried to find homes for, any emergency vet bills, and so on, but the surgeries for the ferals would be covered. That got us a really good start on the colony. But starting to manage the colony without finishing would have been a disaster, so we started trying to find some additional help.

We found that there is an intricate web of cat groups in the area. Many of these groups cooperate with each other on crisis situations, but remain apart due to differing philosophies and policies. Some groups strongly oppose killing any cats in a colony, others fear disease and so test and euthanize at times entire colonies of cats for FIV or FeLV. Some groups promote high standards of care for feral cats, something I can’t argue with. Others have elaborate systems of tracking, wanting every cat documented and monitored.

There’s not much I can say about these different policies beyond the idea that we were thrust, alone, into an intolerable situation with very limited resources to address it. Had we not started sterilizing cats, even before we’d documented all the cats in the colony, prior to getting cooperation from all the feeders, we would have shortly had double the original number of cats. In the end we never got the cooperation of all the feeders, but at least we stopped the essentially constant breeding (we had litters of kittens born early March through Christmas). Had we tested all the cats, our costs would have sky-rocketed, since we would have had to pay for the testing out of pocket. We try to feed the ferals decent food, but it appears to me that other feeders put out table scraps and in one case, giant bowls of steamed white rice. I can’t disagree with a group that wants to see feral cats fed an organic and holistic diet, but I’d be happy to see the people in my neighborhood putting out the absolute cheapest food available, so long as it’s actually cat food.

I want to care for these cats and safeguard them. I’ve advocated to neighbors and children for tolerance and kindness to the cats. We’ve taken cats to the vet when they were sick or injured. I worry about them. I’ve spent evenings in the rain looking for cats who didn’t show up at meal time.

But if I waited to get the entire neighborhood on board with caring for the cats (which still hasn’t happened) that would have been additional months, maybe years of kittens, kittens, kittens. If I’d spent the money on holistic organic food for the ferals, that would have meant that many fewer sterilizations.

It breaks my heart in how imperfect it all is, how precarious their survival is, and yet I’m not sorry we just dove in and started sterilizing because the problem would have grown exponentially with each delay. The whole experience just convinces me all the more that when it comes to companion animal issues we need free and easily accessible spays and neuters. I have traps, I’m here, I could catch a lot of cats, but what I can’t do is pay for it all.

I'm ending with a picture of Ladybug. She is a tame cat that came into my care, through my work on the colony, as a starvation victim with the upper respiratory virus. She has now gone into foster care with someone who has a little more time and a little more space to take care of Ladybug. This was a situation that really upset me. She gained a lot of weight, just during the few weeks she was with me, but recovery from that kind of starvation takes a lot of time.